Many early Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) modems implement the layer 1 protocol in software. As data rates have increased, the need for hardware support for some functions has been required. In wireless communication systems such as 3GPP, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS), hardware modules have recently been introduced to act as accelerators for some of the more compute-intensive operations.
One such operation is ciphering, whereby the manipulation of encryption keys and the actual encryption of data increases required processing capacity in proportion to the amount of data being manipulated. Within the security architecture of a 3GPP system, there are two standardized algorithms: a confidentially cipher algorithm “f8” and an integrity cipher algorithm “f9”.
A means for efficiently performing ciphering calculations while data is being moved from one memory (i.e., layer) to another is desired.